Chess History and Legends: From Chaturanga to the Gods

The wheat and chessboard legend

The most famous chess legend tells of a wise man who presents the game to an Indian ruler. Delighted, the king invites him to name his reward. The inventor modestly asks for grains of wheat: one on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, and so on, doubling with every square.

The king laughs at such a small request until his mathematicians bring him the total. Across all 64 squares it comes to 2 to the power of 64 minus 1 grains, which is 18,446,744,073,709,551,615. That is far more wheat than the whole world could harvest in many centuries. The tale survives in Persian and Arabic storytelling, sometimes with rice instead of wheat. It is a legend rather than history, but it is still a favorite way to show just how explosive exponential growth is.

Chaturanga: the roots in India

According to most historians, the earliest direct ancestor of chess appeared in India, probably around the 6th century AD. It was called chaturanga, which roughly means four limbs, a reference to the four divisions of an ancient Indian army: infantry, cavalry, elephants and chariots.

Those divisions still live on the board today. The infantry became pawns, the cavalry became knights and the chariots became rooks. The elephants took a winding path to become our bishops. In Spanish, the bishop is still called alfil, a word that goes back to the Arabic for elephant.

Through Persia and the Arab world

From India, the game travelled to Persia, where it was known as chatrang. After the Arab conquest of Persia in the 7th century it became shatranj and spread across the Islamic world, where the first books of chess problems and games were written.

Persia gave chess two words every player knows. Shah means king, which is where the word chess itself comes from. Checkmate goes back to the Persian shah mat, usually understood as the king is helpless or the king is defeated. The great Persian epic, the Shahnameh, even tells how the game arrived from India at the Persian court as a riddle to be solved.

Arrival in Europe and the new queen

By around the year 1000 at the latest, the game had reached Europe through Spain and Italy and quickly won fans at royal courts and in monasteries. Next to the king stood a counselor piece that could only move one square diagonally. In Europe it turned into the queen.

Toward the end of the 15th century the rules changed dramatically. The queen could now move any distance in any direction, and the bishop gained its modern range too. The game became faster and far more aggressive, and modern chess was born. A famous reminder of the medieval passion for chess is the Lewis chessmen, 12th century pieces carved from walrus ivory and found on a Scottish island.

Chess in myth, poetry and art

Since nobody knew who had invented chess, people liked to credit famous figures. Medieval storytellers claimed, for example, that the Greek hero Palamedes created the game during the siege of Troy to keep the soldiers busy. That cannot be true, since chess is far younger than the Trojan legends, but it shows how grand an origin people wanted for their favorite game.

The gods themselves sat down at the board in poetry. In a 16th century Latin poem, Apollo and Mercury play a game in front of the assembled gods of Olympus. An 18th century poet later invented Caissa, a nymph who is still jokingly called the goddess of chess. Medieval chess books also read the pieces as a picture of society, from the king down to the humble peasant.

• Greece: medieval legends named Palamedes as the inventor, and Renaissance poets seated the Olympians at the board.
• The North: in the Old Norse Voluspa, the gods find golden game pieces in the grass after the end of the world. It refers to a Norse board game, not chess.
• Egypt: boards for the game senet, far older than chess and linked to the afterlife, were found in pharaohs' tombs.

Why gods belong on the chessboard

Chess has always been a game about power. Kings, armies and counselors fight over a realm, and every move decides the fate of the pieces. Small wonder that people have long linked the board to gods who rule over destiny. For the length of a game, every player becomes the ruler of a little world.

Chess of the Gods builds on exactly that idea. You play real chess with every rule against the computer, and your opponent is one of 24 gods from Greece, Egypt and the North. Before the first move, each side hides a trap on ranks 3 to 6, and you spend favor on powers that replace your move. Zeus is playable from the start, and three wins unlock Gaia and Hermes.